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So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.


The Profile


Zanzibar
Age. 39
Gender. Female
Ethnicity. that of my father and his father before him
Location Altadena, CA
School. Other
» More info.
The World









The Link To Zanzibar's Past
This is my page in the beloved art community that my sister got me into:

Samarinda

Extra points for people who know what Samarinda is.
The Phases of the Moon Module
CURRENT MOON
Croc Hunter/Combat Wombat
My hero(s)
Only My Favorite Baseball Player EVER


Aw, Larry Walker, how I loved thee.
The Schedule
M: Science and Exploration
T: Cook a nice dinner
W: PARKOUR!
Th: Parties, movies, dinners
F: Picnics, the Louvre
S: Read books, go for walks, PARKOUR
Su: Philosophy, Religion
The Reading List
This list starts Summer 2006
A Crocodile on the Sandbank
Looking Backwards
Wild Swans
Exodus
1984
Tales of the Alhambra (in progress)
Dark Lord of Derkholm
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
The Lost Years of Merlin
Harry Potter a l'ecole des sorciers (in progress)
Atlas Shrugged (in progress)
Uglies
Pretties
Specials
A Long Way Gone (story of a boy soldier in Sierra Leone- met the author! w00t!)
The Eye of the World: Book One of the Wheel of Time
From Magma to Tephra (in progress)
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Harry Potter 7
The No. 1 Lady's Detective Agency
Introduction to Planetary Volcanism
A Child Called "It"
Pompeii
Is Multi-Culturalism Bad for Women?
Americans in Southeast Asia: Roots of Commitment (in progress)
What's So Great About Christianity?
Aeolian Geomorphology
Aeolian Dust and Dust Deposits
The City of Ember
The People of Sparks
Cube Route
When I was in Cuba, I was a German Shepard
Bound
The Golden Compass
Clan of the Cave Bear
The 9/11 Commission Report (2nd time through, graphic novel format this time, ip)
The Incredible Shrinking Man
Twilight
Eclipse
New Moon
Breaking Dawn
Armageddon's Children
The Elves of Cintra
The Gypsy Morph
Animorphs #23: The Pretender
Animorphs #25: The Extreme
Animorphs #26: The Attack
Crucial Conversations
A Journey to the Center of the Earth
A Great and Terrible Beauty
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Dandelion Wine
To Sir, With Love
London Calling
Watership Down
The Invisible
Alice in Wonderland
Through the Looking Glass
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
The Host
The Hunger Games
Catching Fire
Shadows and Strongholds
The Jungle Book
Beatrice and Virgil
Infidel
Neuromancer
The Help
Flip
Zion Andrews
The Unit
Princess
Quantum Brain
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
No One Ever Told Us We Were Defeated
Delirium
Memento Nora
Robopocalypse
The Name of the Wind
The Terror
Sister
Tao Te Ching
What Paul Meant
Lao Tzu and Taoism
Libyan Sands
Sand and Sandstones
Lost Christianites: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew
The Science of God
Calculating God
Great Contemporaries, by Winston Churchill
City of Bones
Around the World in 80 Days, by Jules Verne
Divergent
Stranger in a Strange Land
The Old Man and the Sea
Flowers for Algernon
Au Bonheur des Ogres
The Martian
The Road to Serfdom
De La Terre � la Lune (ip)
In the Light of What We Know
Devil in the White City
2312
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
Red Mars
How to Be a Good Wife
A Mote in God's Eye
A Gentleman in Russia
The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism
Seneca: Letters from a Stoic
The Juanes Module


Juanes just needed his own mod. Who can disagree.
Other People's Minds
Tuesday. 10.22.13 5:45 pm
“I read an article about a woman who tried out a new kind of neural network,” I say. “She was supposed to do something that she had never done, in this case shoot a gun, both with and without the neural network in place. You know, because the study took place in America.” I can’t see him, but I hear him laugh.
“In her article she said, ‘You know that voice that’s in your head all the time that says ‘You’re terrible at this, you’re terrible at this, you’re embarrassing yourself, stop stop stop’? When I was wearing the neural network the voice stopped completely.’ Suddenly she could concentrate on her task and her marksmanship went way, way up. The effect of the neural net lasted for a few days but then the voice slowly came back. I found the article fascinating because the woman assumed that everyone had that voice in their head. Only--- I don’t.”

“You don’t?” he asks.
I shake my head. “Nah—when I try something new I think, ‘you are not very good at this because you are just beginning, but if you practice a lot you will get better.’ I think there are a lot of people who do have this voice though, who live all of the time with this kind of overbearing, overwhelming negative self-talk.”
“When do you think having more than one voice in your head becomes an actual problem?” he asks neutrally.
I shrug. I’ve thought a lot about this problem. I say that maybe it’s when you can’t tell whether or not the voice belongs to you anymore.
He has lots of voices in his head, he says. They argue with each other all the time. When he is speaking, one voice says, “Oh, you should talk about this.” Another voice says, “MAKE SURE TO ADD THIS!” Another voice says, “You should probably say it a different way.” The voice that comes out of his mouth, he says, which he calls the spokesperson of his brain, tries to deal with all of these intersecting voices in order to make coherent sentences, but the result is sometimes a way of speaking that sounds rather scatter-brained. He thinks that maybe having many voices in your head only becomes a real problem when your spokesperson voice starts losing his power to control the others, or he starts to let them speak straight to the world instead of managing them.

He says that some people have a warehouse in their minds, but he tends to keep things in randomly oriented stacks. He thinks he has a good idea of where he’s put everything in the stacks, but often he has to go rooting around trying to find some piece of information that got lost.

He says that sometimes a thought will take hold of him and not let go. It runs through his mind on a circular track. Each time it passes it gains speed, like a particle in a particle accelerator, until it is spinning around in his head so fast he can’t even control it any more. That’s what happens to his worries sometimes, he says.

He once said that he liked me because I seemed to radiate calm. Now I can see why. There is only one of me up here. It is very quiet inside my head. I tend to credit my belief in God for my general metaphysical calmness, but I think my head has been much quieter than most people’s before I ever really believed there was a God.

I still have thoughts that upset me; thought spirals which make me sad or angry. I still have thoughts that come into my head which I don’t care to think about. For the most part my head has the ability to dismiss them. I actually dismiss thoughts like school pupils. I read about it once, on a meditation website. “You’re dismissed,” I say to my unwanted thoughts, unemotional, passionless, and my unwanted thoughts fade away. If, before I sleep, I feel like my head is spinning away with thoughts like a top, I say a prayer, anything rote and soothing, and I imagine the top slowly precessing until it falls over and releases me to sleep. But my head hardly ever feels like a top anymore.

It’s very quiet in here.

Sometimes I have a hard time putting my eyes in focus; that’s when my mind goes on vacation and there is nobody in there at all.

“You should come and spend some time in my head,” I say.
“I doubt you would want to spend time in mine,” he says.

I disagree.

3 Comments.


I agree with you. I like the fact that I have multiple levels of myself weighing in on things...it feels like a relationship with myself, and that's sort of nice.

re: Well, caring about someone definitely isn't a romantic gesture, and we're in college--everyone gets in a big cuddle pile. I'd say it's pretty straightforward.
» Unicornasaurus on 2013-10-23 03:19:20

It's rather comforting to read about your friend. He thinks exactly the same way that I do and I find myself always asking that same questions. Sometimes, its fun. In an instant, you don't just have one or two bantering thoughts (a simple mitosis of consciousness), you can have an entire world, with mountains and valleys and streams... palaces built on floating rocks and sea monsters with giraffes spots. Then you start building people with their own lives and their own problems and before you know it, you're very wrapped up with their problems and you desperately want to help them, all of them, even the people you made start the problems, because in the end, it's all your fault anyway. But then, you know all that.
» jinyu on 2013-10-24 12:06:33

hmm.. do u do meditation?

what would u like to ask the tarot?
» renaye on 2013-10-24 09:34:54

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